How to deal with elephants

[Dedas]

I didn't mean that you should wrap all the mages in your kingdom together to go on some crazy elephant cleansing crusade. What I meant was that you can use them as backup to stop an elephant rush happening at your front door, instead of just sacrificing your army alone in a no win fight. They could topple the odds in your favor with the right low level spells, spells that I wanted to make a list of. Oh, and we are still talking early to mid game here.


Yes, nets work well on elephants actually, as it stops their trampling for a turn (they soon break free thanks to their great strength) and lowers their defense to 1. So yes, against a few elephants this might work, but when you have a wall of them, well then you need to split them up, netting them piecemeal. This is where you combine nets with spells.
In other words: it all revolves around disrupting and dispersing the "wall of trampling". If it comes too close to your lines you are dead. You have to smash that wall before that happens, then it is fairly easy to you crush the bricks that falls through with your regular troops.

[Sir_Dr_D]

Unless you have flaming arrows wouldn't massing indy barbarians be more effective then indy archers?

[sector24]

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think elephants often have 9 morale. Most of the time they have 11, and sometimes quite a bit higher. It seems to me the whole idea of elephants panicking needs to be reworked. When I think of a low morale unit, I'm thinking about guys with 5 or 6 morale, not 9 or 11.

[Jazzepi]

I don't think any unit in the game has base morale that low.

Jazzepi

[Salamander8]

Lowest I can think of offhand are the basic slave forces (triton, merfolk, atlantians, not Lobo Guards of course) of R'Lyeh with 8.

[Jazzepi]

8 is extremely low, by the way, in enemy dominion it becomes a 7.

To give you an example, I was attempting to take over a province offered to me for sale that had 20 points of PD in it. With about 10 archers, my 7 morale 80 man squad broke in about four volleys.

Jazzepi

[Salamander8]

Yeah 8 is very bad. That's the main reason I try to not build many of those types and stick with the less skilled, but mindless Lobo Guards as any R'Lyeh. Although I have had a lot of success with the cowardly troops with a hero with the valor hall of fame ability leading them.

[sector24]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that any unit actually has morale that low. But the in game description says that average human morale is 10, 8 is low and 15 is high. I have a hard time understanding how 9 is "low". One less than average isn't really panicky, is it? It sure isn't in games when elephants are used against me.

[Wahnsinniger]

Since I cannot find the thread that talked endlessly about fixing elephant rushes...I'll post this here. Why not just make it impossible to have animal and non-animal units in the same squad. It makes no sense anyway. A bunch of militia wouldn't be sharing a barracks with a bunch of war dogs, and no elite soldiers would fight right alongside elephants because of their unreliability. That way the Elephants 'relatively' low morale couldn't be boosted by high-morale units.

[sum1lost]

Jazzepi said:
I don't think any unit in the game has base morale that low.

Jazzepi

Markatas, maybe?